Yanks-Sox rivalry spills into booth with surprise visit from dad

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3:29 AM UTC

“Hey, so I heard your dad was a big Red Sox fan, and you were too, until you were about 8 years old. What happened?”

That was the question Jim King put to his son, Yankees reliever Michael King, in a surprise Father’s Day segment from the ESPN broadcast booth during Sunday night’s Red Sox-Yankees series finale at Fenway Park.

He can laugh about it now, but can you imagine what it was like for Jim to find out his young son had switched allegiances from his own beloved Red Sox to the Yankees 20 years ago?

It all started with Game 5 of the 2003 American League Championship Series between the archrivals at Fenway Park. Originally scheduled for a Monday night, it was pushed back due to a rainout earlier in the series, and as a result, Jim couldn’t take Michael because the game conflicted with his work schedule.

“And [my dad’s] like, ‘No, it’s once in a lifetime, Red Sox-Yankees — Michelle [my mom], you’ve gotta take him,'” Michael remembered. “So we end up going to the game. My mom’s a massive Yankees fan and her favorite Yankee ever is Mariano Rivera. And … we watched the Yankees win and Mariano closed it out, and I’m a little 8-year-old kid sitting in the stands.”

You can infer from that what happened next. Michael had $20 his dad had given him to buy a souvenir, and when Jim saw his son later on, the boy was wearing a Yankees cap.

Little did they know that two decades later, they’d be laughing about that moment as Michael wore another Yankees cap — this one a little bigger and with a touch of blue in celebration of Father’s Day — in the very same park in which he fell in love with the Yanks.

This time, though, Michael wasn’t sitting in the stands. He was in the Yankees’ bullpen, a vantage point from which he could see his dad, beaming with pride, in the broadcast booth.

“Mikey, you know how proud I am of you,” Jim said. “It’s more than just baseball, my friend.”